Paying the price for folly

SEE your electricity bill soar 20 per cent this month? That’s proof you’ve been conned by politicians flogging mad global warming schemes.

Let me remind you of what Kevin Rudd, one of the biggest of these shysters, told you a decade ago.

Back then, this soon-to-be prime minister was already spruiking Labor’s plan to force you off cheap coal-fired electricity and onto expensive wind and solar power.

We had to halve our carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 to stop the world heating too much, Rudd claimed.

And here is what he told you this would cost over the next 45 years: “In the vicinity of $45 per person over that period of time or something like $1 per person per year.”

Now look at your electricity bill after this latest price hike, on top of all the others as both Labor and the Liberals went global warming crazy.

Think that adds up to just $1 a year extra?

Plus add those other global warming schemes you’ve had to pay for: the carbon tax, the solar rebates, the wind farm subsidies, Labor’s disastrous “free insulation” scheme, the global warming conferences, the wave generators that sank and the geothermal power plant at Innamincka that went bust.

Every month our politicians dream up yet another scheme they claim will help stop the world from frying.

Just last week South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill announced he’d build the world’s biggest battery system to stop more blackouts now that his state depends so much on unreliable wind power.

Yet this battery, expected to cost well over $100 million, is still only big enough to keep a town of just 13,000 homes going for 24 hours.

And all these mad schemes cost us each just $1 a year?

Truth is, we have been taken for deadset morons by politicians selling us make-believe solutions to a makebelieve crisis at a make-believe cost.

And what an horrific price this country is now paying for this fraud.

Wholesale electricity prices for our biggest states have jumped between 150 per cent and 240 per cent over the past two years alone, and South Australia now has the world’s most expensive electricity.

Yes, this massive price rise was partly caused by politicians stupidly banning fracking for cheap gas and forgetting to reserve some of our massive gas exports for use here. But their global warming policies have also hurt us badly. Those policies stopped new coal-fired power stations and forced shut old ones, including two in South Australia and then the massive Hazelwood plant that once generated about 20 per cent of Victoria’s electricity.

For poorer Australians, electricity has become a luxury item, In fact, over the past six years, the number of Victorian households disconnected for not paying their electricity bill has soared 140 per cent.

Readers tell me they are stunned. “Tania” wrote: “I am on a carer’s pension looking after my autistic daughter and I live in fear of not having enough money to pay the gas and electricity bills.”

Peter wrote: “I stopped doing volunteer work at a museum two days a week (because) it was costing me transport and for meals at midday. I now put that money into my electricity costs.”

Business has been hit hard, too. This month a South Australian plastics recycling company was sent broke after its electricity bill shot up from $80,000 a month to $180,000 in less than two years.

That’s 35 more Australians who’ve lost their jobs. And for what?

The sick answer: nothing. It really is all for nothing.

I say that not just because even leading global warming scientists — the IPCC’s Ben Santer and Michael Mann — have just admitted in a paper in Nature Geoscience that the global temperature over the past two decades has not risen as their climate models predicted.

Nor do I say that just because the predicted climate catastrophes have also not happened, with cyclones decreasing, crops increasing and the dams filling.

I also say it because even Australia’s Chief Scientist Alan Finkel admitted last month that Australia is so small that even if we stopped all our emissions we’d still make no real difference to the climate. “Virtually nothing” is how Finkel put it.

So check your monster electricity bill again.

You are paying hundreds of dollars a year more for fake fixes to a fake catastrophe.

People are losing their jobs and pensioners are shivering in cold homes thanks to one of the greatest political frauds in our history. It’s criminal.